As we mentioned earlier, today will kick off the annual Microsoft MIX conference in Las Vegas, NV. MIX is for designers and developers who build innovative web sites. Attendees are coders, strategists, information architects, visual designers, UX professionals and digital marketers. They represent top web sites, web start-ups, interactive agencies and other organizations that do business on the Web.

In a few hours the keynote will start with ScottGuthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division, and Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. As highly expected, we are going to hear about the companies' upcoming release of Silverlight 3 beta. Ars Technica has already spotted some Silverlight 3 beta bits on the Microsoft Download Center which is now available for download.

Microsoft .NET RIA Services March '09 Preview(4.1 MB): Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Microsoft Silverlight 3 Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 SP1(31.3 MB): This package is an add-on for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 3. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1, and it provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic.

Silverlight 3 is going to be the highlight of this year's conference, and we're excited to see what Microsoft has in store for us. Stay tuned, the keynote is scheduled to begin at 9:00 A.M. PDT, a little over two hours away.